Plan to bring thousands of UKIP voters to Tories

The millionaire businessman is hoping to fill the party with ardent Leave voters who wish to secure the hardest of hard Brexits.

The former UKIP donor Arron Banks has told Sky News that he wants to recruit 50,000 new members into the Conservative Party.

He, alongside former UKIP MEP Steven Woolfe, have founded the "Blue Wave" organisation, which is dedicated to recruiting former UKIP members - and others who wish to secure the hardest of hard Brexits - into the Conservatives.

Mr Banks and Mr Woolfe both say that the only way to secure the Brexit they campaigned for is from within the Tory ranks.

Blue Wave cites the fact that Leave.EU, the grassroots pro-Brexit campaigning organisation, sports a million followers on its Facebook page alone.

If just 5% sign up to join the party - both to exert pressure on Brexit internally and vote in the next leadership election - then they will have secured that objective.

They claim they have recruited 3,000 new members to the party in the last three weeks alone - though Conservative Central Office disputes those figures.

Sky News spoke to one such convert called Martin Bardot.

A former UKIP council candidate and long-standing member, he has joined the Tories.

Whatever Blue Wave's achievements, it is nonetheless easy to see why, theoretically at least, the Conservative Party is ripe for entryism.

The latest figures suggest that the Tories have 120,000 members.

With even relatively modest inflows, the equilibrium within the party could be much shifted.

And it isn't just the Brexit equilibrium about which Mr Banks and Mr Woolfe care.

The latter told Sky News that, over the long-term, the aim is to return the Conservatives "back to its roots" - a focus on the military, the family and more traditional values.

The Conservative Party has blocked the membership applications for both Mr Woolfe and Mr Banks.

However, they have both pledged to continue to recruit new members regardless.

Mr Woolfe told Sky News that he had received "lots of support from the grassroots and MPs".

Andrew Bridgen, Tory MP for North West Leicestershire, has pledged to accept Mr Banks into his local association irrespective of the wishes of Central Office - saying it is absurd that with Tory membership at such anaemic levels that the party should turn people away.

One Tory MP told Sky News that they and other colleagues would be willing to take CCHQ to court if they continue to interfere.

In one sense, this is Conservatism returning home, in more ways than one.

You could say that, without the European issue, most of these people who would have been in Conservatives anyway.

Historically, when it had members in the millions, there was always a very strong right of the party.

Many of them were shorn over Europe and David Cameron's turn to a more liberal conservatism.

With new members of a more right-wing hue, it's much harder to see a more liberal centrist Conservative candidate winning with the membership whenever the next leadership election comes.

What hopes for a Ruth Davidson or an Amber Rudd or Jeremy Hunt with tens of thousands of ardent Brexiters swelling the ranks?

They all risk looking like the David Miliband of the Labour Party: good candidates whose party had already intellectually and politically moved on.

handful of the questions — a sentiment his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani shared with the Washington Post.
</p><p>
“There are some that create more issues for us legally than others,” Giuliani told the Washington Post. He said some were “unnecessary,” some were “possible traps,” and “we might consider some as irrelevant.”
</p><p>The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want. They are a disgrace to our Nation and don’t...</p><p>....care how many lives the ruin. These are Angry People, including the highly conflicted Bob Mueller, who worked for Obama for 8 years. They won’t even look at all of the bad acts and crimes on the other side. A TOTAL WITCH HUNT LIKE NO OTHER IN AMERICAN HISTORY!</p><p>
The president's legal team declined to comment when reached by ABC News.
</p><p>
Some 32 individuals and three Russian businesses have been indicted by Mueller and his team of prosecutors on charges ranging from computer hacking to obstruction of justice.
</p>

and Georgia. Democrats in both states are balancing legitimate gripes over voting rights with how and when to respect the legitimacy of election results.
</p><p>
There’s unease inside the White House. The first lady’s ire is enough to get a senior staffer reassigned -- though just barely -- and promises of loyalty and longevity are meaningless if the president is in a certain mood.
</p><p>
There’s also unease inside the victorious House Democratic caucus. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is no closer -- though not necessarily any further -- from securing the votes to become speaker of the House for a second time.
</p><p>
The elections settled plenty of small arguments. But the big ones -- which have long dominated both parties -- remain.
</p><p>
When it is all said and done, it is likely Democrats will have netted just shy of 40 seats in the House for next year.
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With each passing day this week, they flipped more seats as vote tallies were finalized.
</p><p>
As of Thursday they had turned 35 congressional districts from red to blue, and they led in three additional outstanding races.
</p><p>
The total number helps them make the case that the country is asking for a check on the Trump administration, though Republicans’ big victories in the Missouri, North Dakota and Indiana Senate races give them a counter and strong footing in Washington all the same.
</p><p>
However, while some voters -- in red and blue states -- sent their incumbents packing, Florida feels like a wild card. The shadow and uncertainty the president cast over the vote count, plus the messy legal battles, stories of damaged ballots and failing machines, surely left many Floridians wondering if their vote even counted.
</p><p>
On Thursday, a portrait of two vote-counting efforts:
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In Florida, Palm Beach County election supervisor Susan Bucher railed against outdated equipment that encountered mechanical issues as she described the "heroic effort" made by her staff to meet the 3 p.m. machine recount deadline -- one that ultimately fell short.
</p><p>
While in Maine, officials in the secretary of state's office shared a laugh with reporters as they described the minor inconvenience of using "find and replace" on an Excel spreadsheet because some entries for 2nd Congressional District Democrat Jared Golden's name contained a comma and others did not. The minor hiccup soon passed as they input the correct ballot information into a computer program that vaulted Golden to a ranked-choice-aided victory.
</p><p>
If there wasn't already enough evidence out of Florida and Georgia, where debate about matching signatures and confusing ballots rage on, Thursday's contrasting scenes offered greater proof that many states, and perhaps the country as a whole, are in dire need of updated election technology. As for a solution? Look no further than Estonia.
</p><p>
Though the specter of meddling, Russian or otherwise, could forever loom, the United States may be wise to follow the lead of the booming Eastern European nation, where internet-based ballots have been offered since 2005 and are now utilized by nearly one-third of all voters.
</p>

eadline loomed Thursday afternoon – and one key county, Palm Beach, missed it as the state's Senate race now moves into a manual recount.
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Palm Beach’s counting machines had overheated and stopped functioning at least twice this week.
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Recount deadlines are being contested in court, although a federal judge on Thursday denied Sen. Bill Nelson's request to extend them across the state.
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Two Florida races have drawn national attention – the Senate contest between Republican Gov. Rick Scott and Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson – and the governor's contest, between Mayor Andrew Gillum and Rep. Ron DeSantis.
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The Senate race and agriculture commissioner races will move to manual recounts.
</p><p>
A manual recount is solely a hand recount of overvotes and undervotes in the affected races. An overvote is when a voter designated more choices than allowable in the recounted race and an undervote is when a voter made no choice or less than the allowable number of choices in the recounted race.
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The results of the manual recount will be reflected in the official returns due to the Department of State no later than noon on Sunday.
</p><p>
The governor's race is less likely to meet the threshold for a manual recount.
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In the Senate race, Scott leads Nelson by .15 percentage points, according to current totals.
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In the governor's race, DeSantis leads Gillum by .41 percentage points. Gillum has urged Florida to count every vote.
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An unknown number of overseas and military ballots are still coming in – they can arrive until Friday, under state law. Counties will have until Sunday to count them, and official results are not expected to be known in either race until after that happens.
</p><p>
A federal judge on Thursday denied Nelson's request to extend recount deadlines. But Nelson did score a win, in his bid to allow provisional and by-mail ballots where signatures did not match those on voter-registration books, as required by state law.
</p><p>
A federal judge gave voters whose ballots had been rejected until Saturday to correct the issue with election officials. The ruling will affect an unknown number of ballots. Just under 4,000 ballots are known to have been rejected, but that total does not encompass all counties and lacks totals from some key ones, like Duval and Miami-Dade.
</p><p>
Nelson is also challenging Florida's laws over what ballots count, seeking to expand considerations of when a voter intended to select a specific candidate with a ballot mark.
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new video talking about "liberal folks" and making it "just a little more difficult" for them to vote.</p><p>
A campaign spokeswoman for Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith criticized the video, saying the senator was joking. The brief clip appeared on social media days after another video showed Hyde-Smith praising someone at a different event by saying: "If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be on the front row."</p><p>
Hyde-Smith, who is white, faces Democrat Mike Espy, who is black, in a Nov. 27 runoff. The winner gets the final two years of a six-year term.</p><p>
Republicans hold most statewide offices in Mississippi, and this is the state's hardest-fought U.S. Senate race in a generation.</p><p>
Mississippi has a history of racially motivated lynchings. Civil rights activists were also beaten and killed in the state as they pushed for African-Americans' voting rights, particularly from the end of World War II until the 1960s.</p><p>
White said the latest video was shot Nov. 3 while Hyde-Smith campaigned in Starkville, home of Mississippi State University.</p><p>
"And then they remind me, that there's a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who that maybe we don't want to vote. Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. And I think that's a great idea," Hyde-Smith tells a small group.</p><p>
Hyde-Smith campaign spokeswoman Melissa Scallan said of the new video Thursday: "Obviously Sen. Hyde-Smith was making a joke and clearly the video was selectively edited."</p><p>
Espy campaign spokesman Danny Blanton said: "For a state like Mississippi, where voting rights were obtained through sweat and blood, everyone should appreciate that this is not a laughing matter. Mississippians deserve a senator who represents our best qualities, not a walking stereotype who embarrasses our state."</p><p>
Espy is seeking to become Mississippi's first African-American U.S. senator since Reconstruction.</p><p>
A political ad on Facebook this week uses a 1930 photo of a white crowd in Indiana posing around a tree as the lifeless bodies of two black men hang above them, lynched in nooses. The ad superimposes an unrelated photo of Hyde-Smith as text appears: "This is where U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith would like to be."</p><p>
The ad is paid for by PowerPACPlus, a California-based political action committee that has spent nearly $1.8 million in other advertising to support Espy.</p><p>
A video that surfaced Sunday shows Hyde-Smith at a Nov. 2 campaign event in Tupelo making the "public hanging" comment. She said the phrase was "an exaggerated expression of regard" for the supporter and "any attempt to turn this into a negative connotation is ridiculous." At a news conference Monday, she would not answer reporters' repeated questions about the "hanging" comment.</p><p>
Both Espy and the Hyde-Smith campaign condemned the ad.</p><p>
"This is the same out-of-state group that is spending millions of dollars promoting Mike Espy and has now taken his campaign to the lowest depths imaginable," Scallan said. "It is time for Mike Espy to tell his group to end this appalling, divisive attack."</p><p>
Espy said his campaign doesn't control what PowerPACPlus does, and he called the ad "not helpful."</p><p>
"I can't make them pull it down because we didn't ask them to put it up," Espy said. "It's racially divisive. It's something that we didn't endorse, and we'd like them to pull it down."</p><p>
Under federal campaign laws, super PACs are not allowed to coordinate with candidates.</p><p>
The PowerPACPlus website says the group's mission is "to build the political power of America's multiracial majority."</p><p>
Marvin Randolph, spokesman for PowerPACPlus, said the ad with the lynching image is the first in a series of online ads that will be supported by at least $25,000 in spending.</p><p>
"We expect to reach over a million viewers online," Randolph said. "This ad will also appear on Instagram and Twitter."</p><p>
Espy in 1986 became Mississippi's first black U.S. House member since Reconstruction. In 1993 and 1994, he was U.S. agriculture secretary.</p><p>
For AP's complete coverage of the U.S. midterm elections: http://apne.ws/APPolitics . Follow Emily Wagster Pettus on Twitter: http://twitter.com/EWagsterPettus .</p>

what he described as an “epidemic” of addiction.
</p><p>
“The actions #FDA announced today are a response to our deep concern over the epidemic growth in kids use of e-cigarettes,” Gottlieb said in a tweet.
</p><p>
The new policy aims to ensure sweet flavors of electronic nicotine devices are sold in person with age restrictions and calls for, “heightened practices for age verification,” for those products sold online.
</p><p>
Tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, cannot be sold to anyone younger than 18 under current federal law. The new FDA rules now require stores to sell flavored nicotine vape products in "age-restricted" areas. This means a store cannot allow anyone under the age of 18 to see or enter the area where those products are sold.
</p><p>
The limitations do not apply to non-flavored products and do not limit sales of mint, menthol or tobacco flavors.
</p><p>
In the same announcement, the FDA moved to ban menthol flavored cigarettes and flavored cigars. Menthol flavored products harm African American smokers at higher rates, with tobacco companies targeting minority communities with specific advertisements, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
</p><p>
The flavored tobacco ban could take more than a year to implement, according to health officials.
</p><p>
Pediatricians supported the FDA’s new steps, but Dr. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said the regulations were not enough.
</p><p>
“E-cigarette products that appeal to children have no business in the marketplace, period. FDA must take stronger action to protect young people,” Kraft said in a statement. “Pediatricians will not rest until these dangerous products are off the market and out of the hands of children and adolescents.”
</p><p>
The FDA announcement comes with a new report which finds more than 3 million high school students use e-cigarettes. That’s up from 220,000 students in 2011.
</p><p>
At the same time, the number of middle school students using the nicotine products shot up by almost a factor of 10 to more than half a million using the devices in 2018, according to the CDC.
</p><p>
“The data released by the #CDC shows a trend in use that simply cannot stand,” Gottlieb tweeted. “We must reverse this trajectory of youth use and addiction.”
</p><p>
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services identified the growing trend in 2016 and called e-cigarettes dangerous for young people.
</p><p>
The company rolled out what it calls an age-verification system to help ensure only adults are purchasing the flavors online.
</p><p>
The new regulations come on the same day the FDA promotes its anti-smoking campaign which it calls the “Great American Smokeout.” The use of e-cigarettes has been left out of their primary list of tobacco-free alternatives promoted to help adults quit.
</p><p>
Gottlieb has called for the need to regulate e-cigs while acknowledging their use as a way of getting adult smokers to quit.
</p><p>
“I won’t allow policy accommodation we take to promote innovation to come at the expense of an epidemic of use of tobacco products by children,” Gottlieb said in a tweet. “We are now witnessing that epidemic.”</p>

ave submitted letters of no confidence to the influential 1922 Committee.</p><p>At least 18 MPs have submitted letters of no confidence in the prime minister, as the backlash against her draft Brexit agreement grows.</p><p>To trigger a vote that could spark a change in Conservative leader, 48 letters - from 15% of Tory MPs - need to be sent to the backbench 1922 Committee.</p><p>The influential group, chaired by Sir Graham Brady, is responsible for Tory leadership elections.</p><p>As of Friday morning, these are the 18 MPs that have confirmed publicly or to Sky News that they have sent their letters of no confidence:</p><p>More than 60,000 people have signed our petition - have you?</p>

rom a federal prosecutor in Virginia, who was attempting to keep sealed a separate case involving a man accused of coercing a minor for sex.</p><p>
In one sentence, the prosecutor wrote that the charges and arrest warrant "would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter." In another sentence, the prosecutor said that "due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged."</p><p>
It was not immediately clear why Assange's name was included in the document, though Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the Eastern District of Virginia — which had been investigating Assange — said, "The court filing was made in error. That was not the intended name for this filing."</p><p>
The Washington Post reported late Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter, that Assange had indeed been charged. The Associated Press could not immediately confirm that.</p><p>
It was not immediately clear what charges Assange, who has been holed up for years in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, might face.</p><p>
But recently-ousted Attorney General Jeff Sessions last year declared the arrest of Assange a priority. Special counsel Robert Mueller has been investigating whether Trump campaign associates had advance knowledge of Democratic emails that were published by WikiLeaks in the weeks before the 2016 election and that U.S. authorities have said were hacked by Russia. Any arrest could represent a significant development for Mueller's investigation into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to influence the election.</p><p>
Barry Pollack, a lawyer for Assange, told the AP earlier this week that he had no information about possible charges against Assange.</p><p>
The filing was discovered by Seamus Hughes, a terrorism expert at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, who posted it on Twitter hours after The Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department was preparing to prosecute Assange and said, "To be clear, seems Freudian, it's for a different completely unrelated case, every other page is not related to him, EDVA just appears to have assange on the mind when filing motions to seal and used his name."</p><p>
Assange, 47, has resided in the Ecuadorian Embassy for more than six years in a bid to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where he was wanted to sex crimes, or to the United States, whose government he has repeatedly humbled with mass disclosures of classified information.</p><p>
The Australian ex-hacker was once a welcome guest at the Embassy, which takes up part of the ground floor of a stucco-fronted apartment in London's posh Knightsbridge neighborhood. But his relationship with his hosts has soured over the years amid reports of espionage, erratic behavior and diplomatic unease.</p><p>
Any criminal charge is sure to further complicate the already tense relationship.</p><p>
Ecuadorian officials say they have already cut off the WikiLeaks founder's internet, saying it will be restored only if he agrees to stop interfering in the affairs of Ecuador's partners - notably the United States and Spain. Officials have also imposed a series of other restrictions on Assange's activities and visitors and - notably - ordered him to clean after his cat.</p><p>
With shrinking options — an Ecuadorian lawsuit seeking to reverse the restrictions was recently turned down — WikiLeaks announced in September that former spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic journalist who has long served as one of Assange's lieutenants, would take over as editor-in-chief.</p><p>
WikiLeaks has attracted U.S. attention since 2010, when it published thousands of military and State Department documents from Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning. In a Twitter post early Friday, WikiLeaks said the "US case against WikiLeaks started in 2010" and expanded to include other disclosures, including by contractor Edward Snowden.</p><p>
"The prosecutor on the order is not from Mr. Mueller's team and WikiLeaks has never been contacted by anyone from his office," WikiLeaks said.</p><p>
Associated Press writer Raphael Satter in Paris contributed to this report.</p>

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